


Upon a Midnight

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Fluff, Humor, M/M, Post-Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Pre-Slash, There Was Only One… Office Couch?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-21 09:07:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30019428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: The dorms suck, so Ed attempts some oblivious-to-the-box problem-solving.
Relationships: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Comments: 14
Kudos: 343
Collections: RoyEd Weekly Drabble Challenge





	Upon a Midnight

**Author's Note:**

> Another [Roy/Ed Events](https://royedevents.tumblr.com) drabble challenge fill, this time for the prompt "spring"! Unfortunately for all of us, deliberately going in a weird direction with the prompt is a time-honored tradition in the history of… [checks notes] …me.
> 
> Default Tierfal AU of retaining arm and automail applies to this one also. :)

Ed folds his hands behind his head and stares at the ceiling.

Then he folds his hands on his chest and stares at the ceiling.

Then he rolls onto his side and stares at the wall.

Rolling onto his side makes a spring near the edge of the mattress squeal like a discontented pig.

Every two and a half seconds exactly, a drop of water from the faucet in the communal shower room on the other side of the wall forms, rounds, quavers, falls, and splashes into a sink basin. At least the guy from about an hour ago who was hocking up spit in there for an _unhealthy_ amount of time seems to have taken his favorite hobby elsewhere.

Ed could go fix it—the sink, obviously; that guy’s past help—but he’s _almost_ tired and _almost_ warm enough to get to sleep. If he just gives it a couple more seconds, he’s sure that it’ll be fine.

Are his standards higher than before? It’s not like he’s been living in the lap of luxury for the past six years; he’s pretty sure he’s never even seen so much as luxury’s knees. Have the dorms just deteriorated rapidly while he was off in the world, or something? Was he just so focused and intent and frustrated and terrified back then that he was just too preoccupied to notice any of this shit?

Or was it just… Al? Having Al around makes everything better; that much is a proven scientific fact. Ed would prefer not to be doing another long-term validation study right now, but Al wanted to go learn Xingese, and Ed wanted to shore up the dwindling reserves in their bank account without Al ever finding out that the reserves in question needed up-shoring, so here they are.

The research lab in North City gives everybody a couple weeks off in the dead of winter, since even the natives are itching to flee the place for warmer climes at that point, so Ed took out a contract with the one and only Brigadier General Roy ‘Ah, Fullmetal, how nostalgic’ Mustang to tie up a couple of rogue-alchemist-style loose ends that the bastard supposedly hasn’t had time to attend to. Ed is pretty sure that that’s Mustang speech for _My regularly-scheduled office naps were much more compelling than the safety of the nation_ , but the pay’s damn good, and the work’s damn easy, so he doesn’t really care.

He’s actually kind of looking forward to it. He’s been wringing his brain dry in the labs, but he hasn’t had the opportunity to get into a knock-down, drag-out, life-or-death fight in so long that he’s a little worried that his adrenal glands might have atrophied. It might be fun.

Huh. That’s a thought. There is _one_ place in Command—Central and Eastern both—where he’s never had any trouble falling asleep.

He rolls onto his back again. This time the spring creaks like a rusted weathervane twisting in the wind.

He debates it a little more—it’s late to be wandering around Command; he’s not even technically military anymore, and Mustang made some allowances letting him in here in the first place.

Ah, what the hell. Pushing his luck is his calling card.

He sits up and slides to the edge of the bed—the spring musters one last, weary squeak like an old door hinge—and shoves his feet into his boots. He left his coat hanging over the back of the bare wooden chair; he slings it on and wonders if the dorm furniture always looked so colossally uncomfortable, or if part of aging is just accumulating a much larger cache of things that you’re ready to complain about.

One thing that he won’t complain about the new coat—it’s a lot less flashy than the original model, but dark crimson wool still turns heads on the street sometimes, and it has a _gorgeous_ flare around the ankles when he walks fast enough or hurries down any decent set of stairs. Al gave it to him as a goodbye gift and tucked a little letter into one of the inner pockets, which Ed discovered the next week in the lab. He’d had to flee to the bathroom to cry at that point, but he’s pretty sure that nobody knew him well enough back then to be able to differentiate his angry-enough-for-murder face from his distressed-enough-to-sob one, so he probably got away with it.

No crying now, though. Just a simple destination that his feet already know the way to.

Mustang must have warned the sad sacks who still work in this place that he was coming, because nobody gives him any trouble on his way in. They don’t even ask for ID. He’s going to talk to Hawkeye about that; that can’t be _safe_. The lab has better security than this.

It’s working out well for him tonight, though, since he’s too tired to articulate himself anyway. Who knows, maybe _Take it up with Mustang_ would be enough these days. Bastard sure has been playing a lot of cards, if the newspapers are to be believed—which, on second thought, they usually aren’t. Maybe Ed will ask Hawkeye about that, too.

He looks in both directions down the hall before he tries the office door, even though he knows that the place is empty from the fact that he just walked through it.

A ginger touch to the knob alerts him to the fact that it is—somewhat shockingly—unlocked. Either Central Command is undertaking some sort of transformative all-over trust exercise, or something’s wrong here. Mustang’s paranoia is the only reason that any of them are still alive.

Ed eases the door open slowly. It used to creak like that damn spring in that damn bed if you moved it too fast; every week, a different member of the team would swear up and down that they were going to grease it ‘soon’. No one would ever just let Ed clap and fix it; usually they cited ‘distinctly non-standard-issue decorative touches’. Whatever. Their loss.

The lights are out all the way through the office, but the door to Mustang’s little cave stands open a crack, which is even weirder. Ed’s glad that his new boots are quieter than the old ones, even if they’re not as cool. He hates it when Al’s right about stuff like that, but unfortunately all of the accoutrements that look the badassest tend to jingle in a way that would betray you while you were creeping into your ex-C.O.’s office in the dead of night.

Ed can’t see anything strange about the silhouetted shapes of the furniture—except that, beyond the back of the good old couch, Mustang’s desk is _piled_ with papers. The weirdest part is that it looks like the outbox is actually fuller than the inbox, packed nearly to the point of overflowing. Maybe Envy had a cousin called Productivity who’s secretly replaced Mustang, and everyone has definitely _noticed_ , but nobody wants to say anything, because they’re all going to get promoted soon, and…

Ed flicks the light on.

Someone sits bolt upright on the couch.

When Ed has retrieved his soul from the stratosphere—he’s trying to hold it in and force his heart to slow down at the same time by applying gentle pressure to his chest with his left palm—he realizes that it’s… Mustang.

Well—no.

It’s _Roy_.

Mustang wears a blue jacket and a black coat and an expression so supercilious that Ed had had to learn what that word meant in order to be able to snarl it at him in the proper context.

The man who just sat up on the couch—whose hair is sticking up, whose eyes are wide and hazy and all too deep, whose shirtsleeves are rolled up to his elbows, and whose mouth has fallen slightly open as he stares at Ed in the doorway—is definitely… Roy.

Roy clears his throat.

Two can play at that game, so Ed clears his right back.

Roy’s eyes narrow slightly, which at least makes him more recognizable. “What—are you doing here?”

Ed proves his earlier supposition about being unable to generate intelligent conversation right now, which is unfortunately not very helpful. “I was… gonna sleep on your couch.” He tries clearing his throat again. Maybe you have to do it twice when you’re new to it. “What are _you_ doing here?”

Roy blinks at him. It must not have worked yet. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Sleeping on your couch,” Ed says. “Up until a minute ago, anyway. Don’t you have a house?”

“Yes,” Roy says. He’s slowly uncurling his fingers from where he clenched them on the couch back. Apparently he sleeps in his damn gloves—at least when he sleeps in the office, anyway. The worst part is that Ed’s not even surprised. “Don’t you have a dorm room?”

“Yeah,” Ed says. “But it’s shitty. What’s your excuse?”

“It got late,” Roy says, still blinking at him like he might be a mirage. Always full of revelations, this one; maybe next he’ll comment on the curvature of the planet. “I have an early meeting. Didn’t seem to be much point in going all that way for a few hours’ sleep and then coming right back.”

Ed realizes too late that he’s wrinkling his nose. “Isn’t that the entire point of having a house?”

Roy blinks one more time and then shrugs.

“It’s kind of an honest question,” Ed says. “I’m not so great with houses. Um—I guess I’ll… I can just… go.”

Roy pushes a hand—a _gloved_ hand; who even does that?—through his hair, which makes it stick up worse. “You… if you’d like, I have…” He’s already heaving himself up off of the couch before Ed can disclaim that he has never liked anything, not ever, not even once. “I have the train tickets and the rest of the file on Paulson, and then you wouldn’t have to stop by again tomorrow.” He starts moving folders around on the chaos of his desk, which is almost definitely just going to make it even harder for him to find things later. “You’re welcome to either way, of course; everyone would be delighted to see you.”

“Don’t sweat it,” Ed says, which sounds closer to their normal rapport than _Please stop doing that, you’re going to exacerbate your own future suffering_. “I’ll come by. Paulson’s easy; he’s probably just working on copper alloys. That’d burn blue enough to freak out all of his neighbors.”

Roy stops, glances at him, and raises an eyebrow. He looks much less intimidating when Ed’s closer to his height, for one thing; and when he’s halfway out of the uniform, for another. Not that Ed’s going to think about him being halfway—or whole-way—out of the uniform ever, ever again. “You got all of that from a newspaper clipping and a footnote in the contract?”

“Nah,” Ed says. “I got it from a book on pyrotechnics and an unsupervised childhood.”

Roy puts down the folder that was in his hand. He turns, leans back against the desk, and folds his arms across his chest. The other eyebrow rises.

“So how have you been?” he says.

It’s half an hour past midnight, and Roy is asking small-talk questions while they’re standing in his office blinking at each other like… like a pair of insomniacs with dry-eye. Yeah. Kinda like that.

“Fine,” Ed says. “Great. What?”

“What indeed,” Roy says, which makes about as much sense as Ed expected from him. He moves around the desk and pulls open one of the drawers. He takes out and lifts up a handle of brandy. Ed isn’t even going to ask. “Come on,” Roy is saying. He heads back over to the couch, drops down onto it, and waves an arm in what might be an exhausted beckoning sort of motion. “Sit down. How’s Al?”

“Fine,” Ed says. “Great.”

Roy looks over the back of the couch at him, eyebrow arched again, and smiles.

And the thing is—

The thing is that the couch looks inviting. The brandy looks like something you’d probably use to gargle with, or maybe to clean your pipes, but Roy—

Roy looks sleepy and sweet and disheveled and deeply, deeply human. Roy looks like the _Welcome back_ that Ed was secretly kind of waiting for.

He goes over to the couch.

He drops down onto it next to Mustang—next to Roy—next to whoever the hell this is—and arches an eyebrow right back.

“I haven’t even officially started the job yet,” he says, “and you’re trying to get me drunk in your office on a weeknight?”

Roy pulls the stopper out of the bottle and sets it on the edge of the low table, as if he thinks for a second that they’re going to use it again. He doesn’t even have glasses. Ed has to admit that spit-swapping on a brandy bottle with your ex-C.O. in the middle of the night is a hell of a way to start a new life chapter.

“Well,” Roy says, “do you have other plans?”

“Shut up,” Ed says.

  


* * *

  


Ed opens his eyes. Several things are apparent.

The first two are that it’s morning, and he’s less hungover than he would initially have expected. He still feels a bit like he sucked on a cotton ball in his sleep, but they didn’t actually end up getting too far into the brandy; they just kept _talking_ instead. It was… fun. It was really fun.

The third thing, which is intricately related to the first two, is that Roy is passed out mostly on top of him, with his head resting on Ed’s chest. At least he slumped primarily on Ed’s right side, so that Ed’s arm isn’t asleep, although the port sure aches like all hell. Roy’s coat is draped over the both of them.

Ed’s pretty sure that he remembers the vast majority of what happened last night, but he’s nonetheless relatively relieved to ascertain that he’s still wearing his pants. Sleeping with Roy would be one thing; sleeping with Roy and not even _remembering_ it would be another story altogether. For one thing, Winry would laugh her way into a hernia. Al would probably send him a handmade card that said _Congratulations on achieving your teenaged self’s secret dream (probably?)_.

So at least that’s all right.

He looks up at the clock on the wall, which is… somewhat… less all right.

He raises his leaden left arm and pats Roy’s head as gently as he can when his small motor skills are still dozing.

“Hey,” he says.

Roy mumbles something into his collarbone. Roy’s eyelashes flick but don’t rise.

“Hey,” Ed says again, slightly louder. “What time’s my train?”

“Mmn,” Roy says. His eyelids part a little; he blinks drowsily. “Eleven thirty.”

“Good,” Ed says. “What time’s your meeting?”

Roy makes a much less contented noise this time and tries to bury his nose in Ed’s chest again. “Eight.”

Ed pats Roy’s head gently again and then withdraws his hand. “Okay. You’ve got twenty minutes.”

He feels Roy’s heart beat against his twice.

Then Roy flings himself off of the couch with a “ _Fuckshitfuck_ ” that makes Ed very, very proud, and rockets out the door so fast that he probably doesn’t even notice that he isn’t wearing his boots.

Ed sits up and rubs the knuckles of his left hand at his eyes a bit. He casts another baleful glance in the direction of the clock, and then he gets up and stretches. He puts the rest of the brandy back into Roy’s desk drawer, hangs Roy’s coat on the rack, drapes the abandoned cavalry skirt over the back of the couch, and lines Roy’s boots up next to it.

He probably still has ten minutes before Hawkeye turns up. He considers climbing out the window, partly just to make use of all of the cool tricks that Ling taught him since the last time that he was here, but that would require him either to lock the office door—including locking Roy out when he comes hurtling back from the showers in about five minutes, which would be pretty funny under circumstances less likely to sabotage his career—or to leave it unlocked and risk someone sneaking in.

Since Ed is theoretically expected to make an appearance here today anyway, he leaves the window firmly shut and goes over to put the coffee on instead.

All things considered, not a bad start to a morning at all. Mostly. For him, anyway.

Maybe there’ll be time to take Roy out to an early _Glad you survived that experience or whatever_ lunch before he has to catch his train.

Ed obviously doesn’t know more than the average person about angled sightlines, or anything, but it sure seems like things are looking up.


End file.
